For a new bar, Subway Inn is pretty old. The original haunt opened in 1937 on 60th near Lexington, and, after seventy-seven years of serving happy-hour drinkers with sleeves either rolled up or tattooed, as well as New York icons like Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio, and Jay McInerney, the landlord refused to renew its lease, in 2014. Like any true New Yorker, the bar put up a fight, but despite the best efforts of the owner Marcello Salinas and his family the original location succumbed to the city’s seemingly inexorable mutation into a solid block of luxury condos. Happily, since March of last year, the same old neon sign has beamed resiliently onto Second Avenue outside the beery Lazarus’s new home. A few nights ago, two patrons admired the new digs, and found them remarkably similar to the old ones: the entire bar has been meticulously reinstalled and restored by the Salinases, right down to an ancient conglomeration of chewed gum on the underside of one table. The pair settled on a bench by a large window in the back which frames the Roosevelt Island Tramway—a marked improvement on the old view of Bloomingdale’s. “Weren’t you in here a week ago?” a bartender asked, serving affability with a Brooklyn Lager (Subway Inn’s beer has never cost more than six dollars). Wendy Wasserstein once wrote that it was “the kind of dive in which it makes a lot of sense to not order wine.” This holds up. After a few more non-wine drinks, conversation turned to a ride on the aerial tram. “You can perv on apartments really well,” someone said. The tram ride also gives a view of the big city’s bright lights, and the return trip will take you right back to a bar you’ve seen before. ♦